The “conservative wars” between neoconservatives and the Old Right became particularly bitter after a stormy session at the Philadelphia Society in 1986. Mr. Gleaves Whitney, the president of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies and a Senior Contributor to this journal, has written about an event that I remember well.* I was involved in it, [...]
What is one to think of those who not only refuse to learn the lessons that the gift of disabled children teach us but seek to exterminate the teachers so that they don’t have to learn the lessons?… A couple of months ago, whilst visiting the University of Mary in North Dakota to give a [...]
A poignant passage in Immaculée Ilibagiza’s book Left to Tell recounts how her father, a proud and prominent Tutsi in their village, resisted leaving Rwanda in the spring of 1994, shortly before the genocide. The signs of brewing violence were becoming increasingly obvious, but Ilibagiza’s father was determined to be a sign of hope for [...]
Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which [...]
In a recent essay I noted that tradition is not self-contained or absolute. It’s complex, so that superior, subordinate, and parallel traditions often come into conflict. Local tradition may say one thing, Church or national tradition quite another. Also, tradition is not about itself but about goods toward which it’s oriented, so it’s relative to something higher, [...]
In Toy Story 3, the boy Andy is ready to go off to college. His room is being tidied, and his toys are about to be boxed up and stored in the attic. Then Mom makes a mistake and Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang are packed off to a kiddie daycare center called [...]
Contemporary sexual culture is toxic for young women, and until women stand up and acknowledge that fact, despair, sadness, and regret are going to be the underlying chord structure of their very lives. We fail an entire generation when we withhold from them the “wisdom not to do desperate things.” A stereotyped but unconscious despair [...]
One of the biggest mistakes that a student of history can make is to confuse the so-called English “Reformation” with its namesake on the continent. Whereas the Protestant Reformation in Europe was animated by the genuine theological differences that separated those who followed Luther or Calvin from those who accepted the apostolic and ecclesial authority [...]
On the morning of June 24, the world awoke to a changed Europe. With the so-called Brexit referendum, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and as such, the EU lost one of its most important member nations. Almost immediately, there were calls from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to hold similar referenda, jeopardizing [...]
The “Naked Public Square” is Clothed—with Intolerance When Richard John Neuhaus published The Naked Public Square in 1988, his book captured the imagination of a generation of religious conservatives. Neuhaus expressed the concerns of millions of Christians in particular, who saw public life being stripped of religious symbols and content. He went on to argue [...]
Orlando is the place of make-believe. Disney World, Universal Studios, theme parks: They have all served to enchant the imaginations of millions of children and parents alike. Of course, this magical wonderland was shattered early Sunday morning by the rounds of bullets that killed forty-nine people and injured dozens more at the Pulse nightclub, a [...]
For decades, now, Christians have worried about the progressive push to strip naked the public square by forcing religion into the shadows of a private sphere. Recent events have made clear that this is not the case. Everything is public and political to the secular left. All aspects of our lives are fair game in [...]
Our current refusal to stand for the right and the just, and to defend Christians suffering martyrdom on a regular basis, is a stain on our character—and one that the Crusaders never bore. One of the more ignorant bits of political correctness subverting our cultural memory is the movement to ban the Crusader mascot from [...]
How did Americans lose the culture war against same-sex marriage? What caused the tide to turn against us? Did we lose sight of our Western heritage and let education disintegrate, as Christopher Dawson warned? Given the latest battle Catholics have lost in America’s Culture War, I asked myself, how did we get into this mess? [...]